DICKING AROUND

How did we pass the half of our lives we now spend dicking around on the computer? I know, “dicking around” is blatantly sex-and-age-referent, but I don’t mean to leave out you grandmothers, slinging your cursors with the best of us.

Naturally, whatever I did with my time, I don’t remember.

Should we be asking why? What do we do it for? Is it generic boredom?

In a recent New Yorker cartoon, a man sitting on a sidewalk is holding a sign that reads, “Will dick around all day on the internet for food.” Googling for the exact quote, I was swept instead on the current to “What ‘Moby-Dick’ means to me,” a blog post by Philip Hoare; a digressiveness that might have pleased Melville, the avatar of Swept Away. It pleased me, since I just finished (ha!) reading the tale of the great white whale. Hoare’s admiration of the novel matches mine. If you read his post on the New Yorker website, you wouldn’t be dicking around, I promise. As for reading “Moby-Dick,” I wouldn’t recommend it. Nobody has that kind of time.